The bathroom, in this otherwise tired and definitely shabby hotel, is state of the art and I love that. The spare bed is useful to pack my bag.
I do not want to be lugging suitcases round the station, while I negotiate tickets.
The bustle here is infectious, and not for the first time I am reminded of that excitement I felt when I first hit London all those years ago, and Colleen and Collin showed me round. It is a neat time to be here, in early Summer, and of course ridiculously short but, a token gesture as I am off to see Canada,after a life time's wait.
A British breakfast with all the works is achievable for $3.75 and that includes coffee refill.
I try to consciously soak up the precious little time I have as much of today will be at Heathrow. one has to check in 3 hours before an international flight, which in my case is 12 for a 3pm departure.
It's all a breeze because of the location, the train swoops in and a series of horizontal moving escalators makes the walk quicker, and I choose trolleys.
Not for me the extravagance of legroom this time, and of course we are travelling backwards in times so we arrive in Canada initially for me at about 6pm local time.
It's pretty exciting and as I have a connecting flight, I and several others are excused to get off first and be first to get our bags. ell that's the theory but the bags take forever to get to the conveyor.Pretty soon I am on a local plane zooming over the Rockies .
it is later explained to my that I am traversing the Rockies on a diagonal,, which explains why even on a fast plane I saw mountains below, every time the cloud enabled me to see. this was for about 25 minutes. At the time I could not believe the width of that range.
Quite spectacular even from the air!i
The airport shuttle to the hotel which was the Sandman, just had me in it, andther guy told me that a cult thing to do/experience before I leave Canada is to have a Tim Hortons coffee.
The hotel is Downtown , it is raining,. Can't see a whole lot because it is dark now.
friendly staff and I am in the 22nd floor.
The first thing I do is Viber Andrew and then we Skype. Harriet is there, and has exams, so is studying.
Afterwards I am hungry, and it is about 1am local time, but I head out, into the streets at 2.00am, and there are three things open. A Macs which is a general store, a Subway and a Macdonalds.
So my first food I have in North America is. . . Oh I cringe to confess this. . . Yes you guessed, a McDonalds Big Mac. What has the world come to, but I also have an iced coffee and a Blueberry pie and the Philippino boy serving me confesses he had difficulty with the money when he came. They have twenty five cent coins over here. This makes great sense as four of them and you have a dollar and so on but it is all new and it is 2 am . Need to get some sleep. it is still drizzling.This is your second clue as to what was to come. Oh it's all very exciting in the world of travel and tomorrow I head to Banff with Brewster's shuttle, for which I have a voucher.
View from the air of the internal flight from Vancouver to Calgary.
No comments:
Post a Comment